The Center for Tech and Civic Life, a controversial nonprofit organization that used Mark Zuckerberg’s money to increase Democratic voter turnout in the 2020 election, is purchasing space for regional election offices to store ballots and voting apparatus.

The Alliance for Election Excellence (AEE), under the direction of Tiana Epps-Johnson and the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL), began operations in April 2022 with nearly $100 million and is responsible for providing private funding for the nation’s election infrastructure. According to reports, the CTCL disobeyed local election officials and utilized mail-in voting in the 2020 election to increase participation in districts that were almost exclusively Democratic. The CTCL allegedly used hundreds of millions of dollars from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded by the founder of Facebook, to obtain mail-in ballots prior to the election, demonstrating a partisan conflict of interest by supporting the conversion of numerous election offices to vote-by-mail.

According to an AEE press release, Macoupin County, Illinois has received funding to support its operations because it is one of the alliance’s “Centers for Election Excellence.”

“As a Center for Election Excellence, and part of the initial cohort making up the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, they received grant funding allowing them to purchase a building for more secure and accessible space to administer elections,” explains the announcement.

Pete Duncan, the Macoupin County Clerk, emphasized the potential for a conflict of interest if the room were used to store voting machines and ballots:

More on this story via The Republic Brief:

“We’ve run out of space in general but the big thing was there simply was no real secure storage space for our voting machines and ballots – two things that absolutely need to be secured – and the space became difficult to manage when we needed to add in-person voting to already overcrowded, unsecured space.” CONTINUE READING…